Meg Whitman

CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard; ambassador to Kenya

• Born: August 4, 1956
• Place of Birth: Cold Spring Harbor, NY

• Primary Field: Business and commerce
• Specialty: Management, executives, and investors
• Primary Company/Organization: eBay

Introduction

CEO of eBay and Hewlett-Packard; ambassador to Kenya. Meg Whitman is a business leader who has served in executive positions in various companies, from Disney to Hasbro to eBay. Her bid for governor of California in 2010 did not succeed but was quickly followed by invitations to apply her talents and experience to new ventures, notably as Hewlett-Packard's chief executive officer (CEO) in 2011. Well-connected with other corporate leaders, she continues to contribute to American business development, serving on the boards of several major corporations. In 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Whitman as ambassador to Kenya.

Early Life

Margaret “Meg” Cushing Whitman was born the daughter of Hendricks Hallett Whitman, Jr. (businessman) and Margaret Cushing (née Goodhue), a homemaker, on August 4, 1957, in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. On her father's side, Whitman is a descendant of Elnathan Whitman (1785–1868), a member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, and United States Senator Charles Benjamin Farwell (1823–1903) of Illinois. Her mother was from Boston. On her mother's side, she is related to several distinguished Americans, including General Henry Shippen Huidekoper (1839–1918).

Cold Spring Harbor is a small hamlet on the north shore of Long Island in Suffolk County. Whitman was educated in the Cold Spring Harbor school system, graduating from Cold Spring Harbor High School in 1974. She then entered Princeton University, where she studied mathematics and science in anticipation of becoming a physician. She changed her major to economics after she spent a summer selling advertisements for a student magazine. Her bachelor's degree in economics was granted with honors in 1977. She received a Master's of Business Administration in 1979 from Harvard Business School.

Between graduation and 1981, Whitman worked for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, and met Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV, a Harvard medical student whom she married. Harsh was born in St. Louis in 1953, the son of a neurosurgeon. He became a Rhodes Scholar after graduating summa cum laude from Harvard University. He earned a master's degree in neurological sciences at Oxford University and then studied at Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1980.

Life's Work

Whitman's work at Procter & Gamble was with the Noxzema skin care products team. Her work was an education in the marketing of brands of a company and its products that was to serve her well in the future. In 1980, she left Procter & Gamble in order to follow her husband to San Francisco, where he had been accepted as a resident in neurosurgery at the Department of Neurosurgery and the Brain Tumor Research Center of the University of California. In 1981, Bain and Company, a leading business consulting firm, hired her as a consultant. She worked for Bain until 1989, by which time she had become a vice president. Her work was with Mitt Romney, the future Republican Party presidential nominee.

In 1989, Whitman accepted a job with the Walt Disney Company as a senior vice president of marketing consumer products and strategic planning. She helped to launch Disney-themed stores abroad (the first in Japan), using the knowledge of marketing she had learned at Procter & Gamble. She also led the acquisition of Discover magazine as a publishing venture for Disney.

In 1992, Whitman again followed her husband, this time to Boston, where Harsh had been hired as the co-director of the brain tumor program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She took a job as president of Stride Rite Shoes in Lexington, Massachusetts. Stride Rite was a maker of children's shoes, including Sperry topsiders and Keds sneakers.

In 1995, Whitman moved to Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD) as CEO. The job was a challenge because she had to transform FTD into a privately held company. Many company executives resisted some of her strategies, and she also had to contend with the growth of Internet floral delivery services.

In 1997, Whitman moved to Hasbro, Inc., as general manager of the Playskool division. The division was responsible for a number of toys, including Mr. Potato Head and Teletubbies. Soon afterward, a corporate headhunter approached her about an Internet start-up in Silicon Valley. She was reluctant at first because it would mean uprooting the family; however, she visited the offices of eBay in San Jose in February 1998 and soon afterward moved to California to take the helm of eBay.

EBay had begun in 1995 when Pierre M. Omidyar set up an auction website. A message board allowed visitors to the website to develop a sense of community. Soon a small listing fee was charged. By 1998, eBay was growing rapidly and needed a brand builder who could take the company public. Whitman quickly improved the appearance of the website and began making eBay a household name. She oversaw its initial public offering in September 1998.

In 1999, Whitman obtained a Lloyd's of London agreement to issue free insurance for eBay purchases of $200 or less. She also had eBay purchase the 134-year-old auction house of Butterfield and Butterfield. The move cost $260 million, but it helped eBay to move into higher-end transactions. Other acquisitions soon followed, including Kruse International (collectible automobiles), alando.de AG (the largest online European auction company), and Billpoint (which facilitated person-to-person credit card transactions).

The dot-com bubble was at its peak in 1999, with a thousand other entities competing with eBay, including Amazon.com. Whitman was able to meet the competition. She joined forces with AOL, which opened eBay to increased Internet traffic. She was also able to keep the company moving when the price of its stock was halved between 2004 and 2006.

Skype was purchased by eBay in 2005 for $4 billion, despite widespread criticism. It was sold to Microsoft for $8 billion several years later. Whitman also had eBay purchase Rent.com and Shopping.com to gain access to the real estate and commercial markets.

In 2008, Whitman left eBay, also leaving its board of directors in 2009 and the boards of Procter & Gamble and DreamWorks SKG. She then prepared to campaign in the 2010 California gubernatorial race. She defeated Steve Poizner in the Republican primary but lost to former governor Jerry Brown in the general election.

After the November election defeat, Whitman continued her activities in the private sector. In January 2011, she was appointed to the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard (HP). In February, she took a seat on the board of directors of Zipcar, a car-sharing venture whose members can use a land or mobile phone to reserve a car for transport and avoid having to keep and maintain their own vehicles; the idea is to facilitate urban mobility, lessen traffic, and lower pollution, thus creating more livable cities. Between March and September 2011, Whitman was a part-time strategic adviser to the private equity firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield, and Byers. She also joined the board of Teach for America.

In September 2011, Whitman was appointed president and CEO of HP. Former CEO Leo Apotheker had led HP in the purchase of British software maker Autonomy Corporation. However, HP was facing difficult challenges. Soon after it announced that it would probably spin off its personal computer business, there were moves to remove Apotheker. Whitman replaced him as CEO. The move was not viewed as an improvement by many. Some analysts looked upon HP as a victim of bad decisions and upon Whitman as the wrong “fixer.” The price of HP's stock dropped dramatically the day Whitman became CEO.

In the year after Whitman began leading HP, she made a number of significant decisions. These include putting the webOS operation system into open source status, reducing staff by 8 percent, and engaging in a lawsuit with Oracle over internet servers. In May 2012, she announced a plan for revitalizing HP. Included in the plan was the merger of the personal computer and printer divisions in order to increase sales of HP's PCs. Other plans included trimming jobs, restructuring, and product improvements. Whitman publicly stated that it would probably take four or five years to turn the company around.

In 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced that it was dividing into two companies: Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which would sell servers and enterprise services, and HP Inc., which would continue to sell printers and computers. The split was finalized in November 2015, with Whitman serving as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

In 2015 and early 2016, she cochaired the finance committee for New Jersey governor Chris Christie's campaign for president before he withdrew. In 2015, she joined the board for the website SurveyMonkey and also returned to Proctor & Gamble as a director. From 2018 to 2020, she was CEO of the short-lived media content app, Quibi, which failed to meet industry expectations.

In 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Whitman as the ambassador to Kenya. The president's advisers thought Kenya, which is a tech hub in Africa, would be a good fit for Whitman based on her skills and interests. Her nomination was confirmed in July 2022, and she took her post in Nairobi in August. In 2023, she traveled with William Ruto, president of Kenya, to the United States. They toured Silicon Valley in California. She was a proponent of the Why Africa, Why Kenya initiative, noting that the United States is Kenya's largest export market and Kenya is the most stable democracy in East Africa.

She again traveled with President Ruto in 2024 when he returned to the United States for a state visit at the White House. Prior to the event, Whitman and the Kenyan delegation visited Atlanta, Georgia, where some major companies have their headquarters.

Personal Life

Ownership of eBay stock has made Whitman a billionaire and Internet mogul. She has shared her talents and wealth with Princeton University as a member of its board of trustees and as a donor. Harsh and she donated $30 million to Princeton in 2002 to build a new residential college. Other donations have been made to preservation work in Telluride, Colorado; to the Environmental Defense Fund for its Center for Rivers and Deltas; to the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation in Rolling Meadows, Illinois; and to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, where the family worships. Other substantial sums have been given to Whitman's family foundation.

Whitman and Harsh have two sons. Griffith “Grif” Rutherford Harsh V is a Princeton University graduate, and his younger brother William W. “Will” Harsh also attended Princeton. The Whitmans have two grandchildren.

During the California gubernatorial campaign, the family's residence was the target of demonstrators protesting Whitman's positions. Whitman spent more than $160 million of her own fortune to finance the campaign. She has stated that she has no regrets, seeing such expenditures for public office as a sacrifice for the public good.

Bibliography

“Ambassador Margaret “Meg” Whitman.” US Embassy in Kenya, 1 Aug. 2022, ke.usembassy.gov/ambassador-margaret-meg-whitman. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

Cohen, Adam. The Perfect Store: Inside eBay. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Print.

Dolan, Kerry A. "Silicon Valley Billionaire Meg Whitman on Why She 'Runs to the Fire.'" Forbes. Forbes Media, 1 June 2016. Web. 23 June 2016.

Hamilton, Joan O'C. The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life. New York: Crown, 2010. Print.

Horvitz, Leslie Alan. Meg Whitman: President and CEO of eBay. New York: Ferguson, 2005. Print.

Toosi, Nahal. "Meg Whitman's Trying to Be a Different Kind of US Ambassador. Washington Is Noticing." Politico Magazine, 22 May 2024, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/21/whitman-ruto-kenya-cabinet-consideration-00159251. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.

Whitman, Meg. “Meg Whitman.” Interview by Lois Romano. Newsweek 157.21/22 (2011): 26. Print.